Tag Archives: Live Magazine

Yesterday was my last day as Senior Editorial Mentor at Live Magazine in Brixton, which is run by social enterprise Livity. Here’s some of the team past and present.

Live is a brilliant, morphing series of platforms where young people make content with the support of a professional mentor. It was a magazine, then a website and soon it’ll be two new YouTube channels. I worked at Live on and off, and in various capacities, for seven years, which is as long as I was at secondary school. It’s a long time.

I can’t convey all of the funny, brilliant, profound things I witnessed – we’d be here all day (or for the next seven years) but I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of transition and transformation of individuals, of myself and my co-mentors, and of ourselves as an entity. We’ve been secret agents of change, a journalism project with an agenda to empower and enthuse the young people who’ve passed through our doors. Without sounding too soppy, it’s family. It’s about love.

Most transitions take time and I’m lucky enough to have a long view. I know individuals as they are now, working at Westfield or doing well at college, or working for national news media, and I remember where they were when we first met them. Often, this was very far away from the future they subsequently invented for themselves. Some of the biggest successes appear minuscule by mainstream standards but are epic given the challenges facing the individuals concerned. I’m thinking about the person who managed to get herself back into education after being kicked out and ended up with a brace of GCSEs. Or the 16 year old who was out of school for years but harnessed a natural talent for social media – and who’s now applying to college.

It’s not just individuals who have changed. Live itself has changed, too. When I joined to run journalism workshops in 2006 it was very local and often very frontline. We were working with young people who were light years away from the mainstream. These were economic boom times elsewhere in society but not behind the steel shutters of Tunstall Road. We were youth workers who didn’t think we were youth workers, doing things we weren’t qualified to do, but doing them anyway. Take this film that Livity co-founder Sam Conniff made over four Saturdays with a group of young people. It’s a deceivingly raw satire on the trend for wearing gang-affiliated bandanas dominant at the time.

Warning: this clip is very sweary.

Our videos have evolved. This is future star Eve-Yasmin interviewing MC Mic Righteous. Our new channels that we’ll be launching in the autumn are even more ambitious.

Live’s now a place where almost everyone is a highly impressive young creative. In the picture at the top of the piece you’ve got writers, film-makers, artists, activists, musicians and a Forex trader. The landscape has changed, and so have we.

Some observations:

Live’s done a great job of trusting young people to make interesting decisions, and to create a fun and safe place in which you can make mistakes. Mistakes are good. But they’re costly if you make them in the real workplace, especially with youth unemployment running at 20%.

Mentoring isn’t about helping anyone. If we’re being honest, no-one can help anyone. Not really. But we can create the space in which people can succeed in a way that’s real and organic, on their own terms. The benefit is entirely two-way. I have got at least as much out of mentoring at Live as anyone has got from me.

I believe there’s something radical at the heart of Live – and of any organisation that genuinely creates opportunities for young people. That might be a youth club, or an arts college, or in our case, a business. We’ve opened up privileged opportunities to people who don’t have them in their family network and supported them in making the most of the door we’re jamming open. Equally importantly, we’ve created a space where broadly privileged people can work in alliance with young people who from a different class background. It’s healthy to test your assumptions. Where else can you do that?

I’m suddenly reminded of a moment from around 2009 where myself and a young man from Live went up to 10 Downing St to attend a reception. The young man was as impressive as he always is and gave a speech to the great and the good and their crystal decanters. A wealthy-looking lady came up afterwards. “Oh that was wonderful!” she said. “Are there more like you?”

We’re back at Addis transit lounge, on our way back from Rwanda after a week working with the young journalists at Ni Nymapinga. This time we’re in the modern part of the airport and the mix of passengers is much closer to what you’d normally see. There are tourists, business people, families travelling – not the slightly surreal, smoky NGO-ness of our transit stop off on the way out. There is one connection point though: the video screens are still showing a photo gallery titled ‘Endemic birds of Ethiopia’ and we still can’t remember any of them.

The airport lounge is a kind of decompression chamber between Kigali and London and to be honest, there’s a lot to process. We got to see exactly how Ni Nymapinga create their youth-run magazine and highly popular radio show, and we got to see how it exists within Rwandan culture. Ni Nympinga isn’t just something for young people to do – it’s part of a concerted attempt to build a more positive future by empowering girls in a culture where the ideas like men-only foods (mostly high-status meats like chicken or beef) existed in the relatively recent past.

In Rwandan culture girls are expected to be shy and many of the girls we met out in the villages spoke so softly that it was almost hard to hear them. Ni Nymapinga, which is run by Girl Hub is designed to create a conversation between Rwandan girls, delivered in a tone that Rwandan girls will be inclined to hear and absorb. It starts a conversation in a way that respects Rwandan culture, and highlights the brilliant things that girls are doing in the country: the unusual and brave girl who has taken the traditionally-male job as a motorbike taxi driver, or a girl who built her grandmother a house.

The focus is on interesting and inspirational girls rather than celebrities, and the absence of the background status anxiety that so much of our media generates is palpable. The large-scale format of the magazine is more than just an artistic decision: it’s designed to sit over two people’s laps so they can both read it at once. Ni Nyampinga is a complex and multi-layered medium for promoting and supporting pride and positivity amongst Rwandan young people. It might be primarily for and about girls, but the team are now thinking about how they can connect with boys too, and the pieces we created with them included vox pops with boys about their friendships with girls.

This point about connecting with boys is an important one. We met the lady behind Gahaya Links, a social enterprise that supplies woven baskets and jewellery to Macey’s in the US. They were founded by two sisters after the genocide left a gender imbalance, with many women widowed or left alone after their husbands, sons or brother fled the country or received long jail sentences in genocide-related cases. The lady who showed us around the workshops said that empowering women economically had a positive impact on their relationships, too. Men saw that local women were learning skills and were bringing in money and they began to relate to them differently. They saw the women had value – and began to ask if they could learn to weave or sew, too. If Ni Nymapinga want to improve the lives of Rwandan girls then they’re aware they have to do it in the context of talking to everyone, and that includes the boys.

We had such a great week and there’s way too much to communicate in one, or probably a hundred blog posts. A few snapshots: the day when Live Editor Celeste and our International Editor Keisha learned a local dance where girls mimic the movement of a cow, with the last girl still dancing and smiling being named ‘best cow’ – a compliment in a country where those sweet beasts are held in high regard. Or our encounter with the security guard outside the Rwandan Agricultural Bureau where we tried to ask for directions to a food place and confused the word for ‘where’ with the Rwandan word that represents the sound of laughing. Or our glimpse into Kigali high society at a club at the Mille Collines hotel where the DJ played Tinie Tempah and CEOs danced with ballons at a party run by a Rwandan who grew up in Canada, or any of the hundreds of conversations we had with the girls about the differences between their lives, and average lives in London. Or the fact that there’s so much more to Rwanda than the genocide, but that it’s there, waiting behind almost every conversation, because it affected everyone, and still affects everyone. How could it not, when over a million people were killed and the country destroyed, less than two decades ago?

The cultural exchange will continue to colour our thoughts and actions here in London, and hopefully it’s just the start of a beautiful friendship between the teams at Live and at Ni Nyampinga. I think we have a lot to learn from each other.

We’re half way through our week-long collaboration with the girls of Ni Nyampinga. The magazine and radio show might only be two years old but it’s already famous in Rwanda. The degree to which Ni Nyampinga is a household name became clear when we went to visit Marie Adelaide school in Gihara, just east of Kigali. We’d gone to get content for the two features and two radio packages that we are making during our week here, and specifically, we’d gone to find content for a story about how new Rwandan music by artists like Knowless and King James were bringing young people together in friendship.

When we arrived, the whole school was lined up for an al fresco assembly in the yard.

Ni Nyampinga girls Cecile, 22, Beni, 19, Glorious, 24 and Christine, 15 took to the stage and were greeted with cheers and whistles. The story required an interview with a musician so they asked the students if there were any musicians among them. Two candidates were quickly pushed to the front: a rapper and a very shy girl who was described as a gospel singer. The former is already a school star and his peers were enthusiastic in singing back the chorus to his track. The girl performed a version of Rwandan teen favourite Knowless’ song Nzabampari and everyone responded, soft voices dropping then rising, like a Rwandan village version of Donny Hathaway Live In New York.

It was a vibrant welcome for the team who have become slightly famous themselves. Girls and boys throughout the country read the articles in the quarterly magazine, now on issue 7, and hear them weekly on their live radio show which has been running for two years. The magazine is designed to be shared (“not kept in one person’s bag”, says Girl Co-ordinator Pacifique) but still it’s at a premium: the head teacher of the school, a softly-spoken lady who radiated a quiet authority, explained that the magazine is so popular they have to ration it, and only students who are processing well get their hands on the new issue.

Celeste and Keisha took their team off to a youth club south of Kigali to make a story about that perennial question – whether boys and girls can ever really just be friends – and had their own adventures. Back in the office, we collected all the audio, pictures and notes we’d made from our various excursions and finished for the day, dusty, tired, but pretty sure we had the seeds of some very good stories.

And in case you’re wondering, Ni Nyampinga is a Rwandan concept which describes a girl who is beautiful inside and out. A Nyampinga is confident and happy, she makes good decisions, and she knows she is valued because of who she is.

It’s a concept we think might just be useful back in the UK, too.

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Technically, it’s about 3am. Live Editor Celeste and our international Editor Keisha and myself are sitting in the aptly named London cafe in the Addis Ababa transit lounge, waiting for our flight to Kigali, Rwanda.

We’re going because of a partnership we’ve developed with the team at Ni Nyampinga, a magazine and radio show run by girls aged 10-19 in Rwanda. They came to visit us in Brixton a few months ago, and we realised we had a lot in common. There were the obvious things: Live’s run by young people, and so is Ni Nyampinga. Both publications aim to do more than just sell stuff. And both publications have an innovative creation and distribution model. For Ni Nyampinga, innovative doesn’t quite cover it: two years ago, when they started, there was no distribution network in the country. They created one, from scratch.

We met in Brixton, sat round the kitchen table in the office and realised we had a lot to learn from each other. One simple example is that both publications are working out how to integrate their platforms: Live as we focus on our website and YouTube channel, and NN as they try and bring their radio and magazine teams closer together.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, a trip coalesced into reality. We worked out what we needed to do. We got jabs (wow, Typhoid hurts) and our very cool Yellow Fever passes. We learned a few words of Kinyrwandan (watch out for us saying ‘murakoze’ every time you offer us a cup of tea on our return). And we whizzed up a workshop and content creation plan that we hope will allow us to share the best of what Live knows and to find out how things run Kigali-style.

It’s not that Live knows everything and Ni Nyampinga need to learn from us – we know what we know and we can definitely learn a lot from them. In fact we already have. Brand Manager Afrika’s powerpoint issue outlines are definitely a step up from our google doc-based efforts.

So, it’s 3am at Addis Ababa Transit Lounge. It’s a strange mix of people waiting here, many of whom we think are probably working for NGOs, because we keep hearing words like ‘refugee camp’ and ‘south Sudan’. There are a few of the obligatory kids crying, and a lot of people sleeping. It smells of incense and rose petals. There’s a smoking room comprised of an open glass square in the corner of the lounge. There a brilliant film on loop titled Endemic Birds of Ethiopia, which include the squat looking Ankober Serin and the Blue Winged Goose. Keisha’s asleep, thanks mostly to the fact she had to hand in her final uni assignment the night before we left and reckons she slept a full three hours in the previous 90. Celeste is reading a feature on Rwanda’s successful fight against corruption in New Africa and I’m tapping this out.

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I just made a documentary for BBC1Xtra about the new wave of young entrepreneurs coming up with creative responses to the recession, presented by Gemma Cairney. It’s going out tonight.

It was a real pleasure to be able to make this, and not just because I’ve discovered I love making radio. It was a pleasure because I know there’s a huge disconnect between what the mainstream thinks about the youth and what I know from my work as editorial mentor at Live Magazine. Most people are just fed stories of doom and violence, dispossession and laziness. We hear that exams are too easy, that school-leavers can’t read or write, that young people are addicted to their phones or to celebrity and that’s not to mention the constant hum of our obsession with the tiny minority of youth who get involved in criminal violence, who end up as inaccurate poster children for a whole generation. They’re not.

I see a different reality, of a generation – or perhaps more accurately a sector of a generation – who are incredibly motivated and capable. These are people who are spending their teens and easily twenties making their own jobs, setting up charities and social enterprises, starting businesses that will end up employing other young people, or otherwise just doing stuff that will help make them more employable. Enterprise these days, says one of my interviewees, Andre Campbell, isn’t all about The Apprentice. It’s just “a positive hustle”.

I interviewed some positive hustlers for my documentary, like Sam Harris who set up Pedal Power in Bristol, or Live Magazine editor Celeste Houlker who also runs 12th Estate, a social enterprise to support young women who want to set up their own businesses.

The only downside was that I couldn’t include more people, like Beejay Mulenga who I first met when he was 13 and was hurtling headlong into a world of enterprise with his Supa Tuck Shop company and charity Supa Inspire, or the Rianna Price from the supa dupa fly Run Dem Youngers or Shadrack Straker who dreamed up a business that would bring people together and would solve youth unemployment at the same time. He became one of the first Virgin Media Pioneers and has subsequently met Richard Branson on a number of occasions. There are thousands more like them all across the country and I think they’re great.

Just a warning, really. Grime producer Terror Danjah is coming down to the studio tonight to be interviewed on my weekly radio show. I’ve got questions about the space between grime and dubstep, about SB.TV and about his trademark gremlin cackle… and who knows what else’ll come up. He’s a nice man. So nice in fact that he came down to Live Magazine a few weeks ago, armed with a bottle of Lucozade to keep him refreshed while the journalists of the future grilled him for a profile piece we ran in the mag.

I’ll put up a transcript of the interview over the weekend some time, ready to read alongside the show which will be available to listen again on Monday.